Conventional techniques for developing information technology (IT) solutions fail to adequately address the need for business stakeholders to understand the organization and structure of IT solutions to facilitate the maintenance of a business-IT alignment (i.e., ensuring that the IT solutions meets overall business intent throughout the life of the IT solution). These known IT solution development techniques are oriented toward specific technologies, applications and versions of software, thereby hindering the capture and active maintenance of an overall solution context for requirements and changes. Other deficiencies and limitations of conventional IT development techniques include making details of the overall business intent unclear to IT development teams, failing to map IT architecture and design rationale back to business intent adequately, not allowing business stakeholders to fully understand how IT solutions are structured and organized in order to make business decisions that minimize required IT solution changes while maximizing business innovation, hindering the engagement of business stakeholders in lifecycle processes for IT solutions and the effective collaboration of business stakeholders with IT stakeholders. Conventional IT development methods include, for example, Structured Design and Programming, Object Oriented Analysis and Design, Component Based Design, Model Driven Architecture, Rational Unified Process, and Service Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA). These examples of conventional IT development methods primarily serve the IT stakeholders, such as IT architects, IT managers and programmers, while impeding a collaborative use of the known development methods that includes business stakeholders. Business stakeholders find the tools and notations used by these known methods to be intimidating and difficult to understand, thereby hindering the business stakeholders from playing a more effective role in architecting IT solutions to meet business needs. Business stakeholders provide input to these known methods, but do not actively participate in the use of these methods. Thus, there exists a need to overcome at least one of the preceding deficiencies and limitations of the related art.